THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

another’s daily lives and concerns. In the novelist’s own terms it achieved precisely the effect she wanted. ‘Half the
masters [mill owners] are bitterly angry with me’, she wrote of her novel in 1848, ‘— half (and the best half — are
buying it to give to their work people’s libraries’. When Gaskell returned to industrial fiction in North and South
(1854-5) it was as a result of a commission from Dickens to write for his journal Household Words. Her second
Manchester novel (in which the city appears as ‘Milton-Northern’), is radically different from Mary Barton in that it
views class-conflict from a new, politically optimistic, viewpoint, that of potential compromise. There was much
contemporary justification for the optimism. North and South does not, however, compromise on social issues. As its
title implies, it contrasts the snobberies, chivalries, and artificiality of the country gentry of the South of England with
the distinctive energetic anti-gentlemanly world of self made manufacturers of the North. Its highly perceptive
heroine, Margaret Hale, may at first be shocked by a market economy which works ‘as if commerce were everything
and humanity nothing’ but she is later impressed by a dinner at which Manchester men ‘talked in desperate earnest,
— not in the used-up style that wearied her so in the old London parties’. The novel also points to the independence
of industrial workers, a pride in themselves which survives despite the appalling working and living conditions which
they have to endure, which is contrasted to the subservience, acquiescence, and superstition of the rural poor.
Margaret Hale is intelligent, humane, wilful, and independent. She also achieves an active mastery over her
situation which is denied to Gaskell’s other central women characters. Miss Matty, the focus of the easy, rambling
narratives of Cranford (1851-3), has social status and true gentility, but her moral standing is based on decency and
respect within the limited community of a country town. In Ruth (1853), which treats the problem of the unmarried
mother with delicacy and sympathy, Ruth is none the less required to endure a process of redemptive self sacrifice in
order to win back respect from society at large. Gaskell’s two finest novels, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and
Daughters
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(1864-6), both trace the growth and development of their contrasted heroines; Sylvia Robson, a farmer’s daughter, is
barely educated, self willed, passionate, and fatally divided between resolution and equally heady irresolution; Molly
Gibson, the daughter of a respected, widowed doctor, is obliged to face a series of domestic crises in which her initial
insecurity gives way to a resourcefulness, growing maturity and poise which serve to distinguish her from her flighty
step-sister. Sylvia’s marriage proves disastrous; Molly’s prospective alliance with Roger Hamley is a meeting of
equals. Sylvia’s Lovers is set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and its plot hinges on the disappearance of a lover
who is carried off by a press gang enforcing recruitment into the Navy. The representation of northern speech
throughout the narrative serves to reinforce emphatically the precision of its local detailing, but the novel is given a
larger scope by its constant reference to the disruption and violence of war and to the romantically dangerous draw of
the sea. It is one of the finest of provincial novels, indebted to the model provided by the Waverley novels, but
drawing out and subtly amplifying Scott’s example. It explores the lives of humble people with a sympathy and
delicate power which had rarely been seen before in English fiction. Wives and Daughters, by contrast, examines
family relationships and social class from an amplified Trollopian perspective. It is made up of a series of interwoven
stories, but it is also an ambitious, careful, and delicate psychological study of an often fraught household and its
social connections. In 1860 Gaskell had written of Framley Parsonage, then being serialized in the Cornhill
Magazine: ’I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever. I don’t see any reason why it should
ever come to an end ...’. Her pleasure in the slow and easy development of a largely uneventful plot and in the gradual
interaction of upper-middle-class characters is evident in her own novel, also serialized in the Cornhill and abruptly
concluded, but not left unresolved, by her untimely death.
Charles Kingsley (1819-75), a priest of the Church of England by vocation and ordination, and a determined
preacher all his life, tended to use fiction as an extension of his secular and religious missions. In the late 1840s he
had been sufficiently moved by Carlyle’s imperatives to become actively involved in the Christian Socialist
movement, established to wean Chartists away from the French-inspired, anti-clerical and often atheist Socialism into
an alternative religious commitment to the reform of society. Yeast: A Problem, serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in
1848, intersperses scenes describing rural degradation with a narrative discourse which entwines an advocacy of
sanitary reform with dire warnings about the moral dangers of Roman Catholicism. Its successor, Alton Locke: Tailor
and Poet (1850), is a far more impressive achievement. Alton Locke purports to be the autobiography of a working
man, stung into Chartist protest by his experience of sweated labour, London poverty, and fever-haunted London
slums, but finally persuaded of the fitness of the Christian Socialist cause. Kingsley’s frank descriptions of the effects
of a cholera epidemic in the slums are particularly powerful. His later novels, with the exception of Two
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Years Ago (1857), have historical settings and arguments tailored to appeal to modern sensibilities and modern